Fried at Last: Why Michael Fried’s Attacks on Literalism Matter As Never Before

Finally! The real Michael Fried has stood up. A new collection of his life’s work reveals him to be a poet with a memory bestowed from the gods—one who weathered Peter Schjeldahl’s trumped-up charges of being a formalist, conservative fuddy-dud, one who emerges in our AI slop epoch as one of the great art seers who makes a frightening lot of sense, now more than ever. The critic who found a helpful narrative to understand the history, and future, of our images, without a drop o